BEST RAP WRITING OF 2014: THE BLATLANTA PAPERS

 Middle school era Thugger and DC Young Fly

Follow me as I turn this blog into a gossip rag. Yung Barvey Kingpin giving you the raw and real messageboard rumors. Cause if I don't muckrake, who will?

Members of the Coli fraternal order are claiming that the now dormant account Blatlanta is Ralo or "somebody close to him within that FAMERICA camp." I won't attribute words to a source without legitimate proof, but whoever it was submits a dossier of intriguing insider info; in particular, the 2014 thread "Young Thug nikka is a straight up batty bwoy," in which he questions the notion that Young Thug's gender subversion is anything more than a cynical cash grab.

Even if true, does contrivance change anything in a world where presentation is reality? Lou and Bowie may or may not have rode dick for counterculture points, but they were still getting gay in public at a time when that was taboo. Put a read on this:

Dude trollin hard as fukk and he's always been a nikka who did shyt just for attention since High School he's just gettin more extreme with it nowadays cause he's doing it on a larger scale. nikkas voted him best dressed in high school as a joke...I went to high school with him for a few years before he transferred after getting jumped and beat with a bat(hence those facial scars and why his teeth used to be fukked up) in like 9th or the beginning of 10th grade. Everybody used to call him "Lil Jeff"..

He one of them ugly ass funny nikkas that always did crazy or odd shyt to get attention from hoes. He started QB in high school and was a basketball star, his dad is a local legend for athletics and coaches bball at the high school. He aint really start going crazy til he started taking rap real serious, dude had a scholarship to college for athletics and fukked it all up.

He a real hood nikka tho, not a drug dealer but more of a user that would rob dealers or set em up and such. He got hella p*ssy on the block too and his name whole weight on the southside and westside of ATL heavy, nikka got like 6 kids around the city and tons of baby mamas and he only 23.
 
Dude tied up in so much bullshyt between signing 360 contracts and owed street debts that he not really eating off his career. Birdman taking 15% of everything himself and I know the 300 ENT 360 deal he signed prolly taking at least another 15-30%....

He been rapping since like 2010 and wasnt really seeing any success from it outside of the hood of ATL so this gay shyt just a way for him to get attention on a larger scale, I know him and his manager, and his sisters and all the nikkas he used to be on the block with and its obviously a gimmick. His manager told me they were looking for a way to garner attention for him to take to the next level last september right after he invested 10K to fix his teeth.
The nikkas from his block say he "gay for pay" now lol....

Once he got his teeth fixed thats when the gimmicks started just watch the vids below he used to be crazy and outgoing, now the nikka wanna act shy and barely talk at all in an interview, Rich homie gotta talk for him lol. Dude been drugged up, it's just that he softened himself up to get mainstream attention...a suspect "gay" rapper named Young Thug is perfect for 2014.

That last sentence >>>> every Young Thug thinkpiece. Blatlanta then claims, "Peewee Longway's whole career is based off being Thug's lean, weed and molly man. Like Thug had been copping from him for years and then once Peewee started rapping Thug basically put him on in exchange for drugs to use lol..."

What's the basis for the belief that this is Ralo? A signature now gone, a still from an early Ralo video as an avatar, the insider info and photos - in a word, only circumstantial evidence. In any event, his assertions give new insight into Thugger's media savvy. Whether it was a contrived stunt or a heartfelt rejection of binary gender roles, his antics kept homophobes and -philes talking. Andre 3000 might have done it first, but that was long before the thinkpiece bubble descended on us. Thugger knew what critics and open-minded fans wanted to see. The rest is thinkpiece history.

THE LONG-AWAITED SEQUEL TO MY BOYS (JORDANA SPIRO FANS, GET IN LINE)

Ayo what's good wit yours, ya boy broadcasting live waiting to see if this bitchass Hurricane Matthew is gonna knuck up or just make meaningless noise like a force-of-nature vuvuzela. That's dedication, yo, word to the well-groomed Anderson Cooper, we some real bloggin Gs outchea.

Aight, so as Young Thug continues to devolve from rapper to art project, and until Thug restores his Homie Quan's honorific from Bitch to Rich, Ralo is emerging as the necessary counterpoint. It's kind of like a 'Kast dynamic, where Ralo keeps Young Thug's flakiest Klaus Nomi daydreams tethered to reality, but it might be more like the Pusha-Malice symbiosis in Clipse, where each MC is a slight variation on the other and they sorta bleed together hydra-style.

As with the triumphant "My Boys," they joined by the always welcome Croonin' Trouble. I can't be the only guy who prefers this mk. of Trouble to the Troubaveli-isms of yore.

That's about it. Hopefully we'll be back and bloggin soon, provided my cabeza don't get bonked by a flying coconut or another tropical object. By the way, this post is IN NO WAY a reaction to Ralo "liking" a tweet I made comparing his voice to Magoo doing a Meatwad impression, nor is it affected by my uncertainty as to whether this "like" was benign or menacing. CHUUUUUCH

KONTENT IS KING

I'm drowning in all this content, mayne. First Barter 6, then Rich Gang got hax0red on some Johnny Lee Miller shit; now Slime Season drops in the same week Future and Drake subject the world to a friendship bracelet on wax? Too much is too much when it's too much! Pretty soon you find yaself wild-eyed, screaming,"The Unabomber had a point!" to the drive-thru crew at Jack in the Box, until you fall to your knees in your supervillain moment of self-realization, arms reaching toward the heavens in bewildered supplication like, "What have I become?"

Remember when a leak could compromise an entire project? A guy like Dr. Dre might have scrapped the whole thing and shot some more steroids into his butt, but Yang Thurg just goes ahead and puts em on his new 'tape - six of the joints on Slime Season are reprinted courtesy of the Rich Gang Liberation of 2015. Some might see this as a sign that the artist has effectively liberated himself from the commercial apparatus, that it's just about the music now that records don't sell, but I don't know. I'm no economist, despite the numbers I'm doing slangin meringue, but I do know this: commodification don't die, it multiplies.

Since Young Thug killed words and inaugurated a post-verbal order, each post on this website will now be a series of baby noises recorded in .wma format. Googoo gaga, bitch. Also, does anyone care about Rich Homie Quonset Hut anymore? My man needs to kiss 'n' make up with Yurng Thag 'less he wanna end up like Shelley Long when she left Cheers. 

LET'S TALK ABOUT SEX, BABY: THE PORNOGRAPHY OF J. COLE, THE SEXUAL LIBERATION OF YOUNG THUG!!!

On "Planes," J. COLE compares sex oral sex with him to having a foot stuck in your vagina mouth.  It is the most disturbing lyric of the year, not least because J. Cole is supposed to be a different kind of rapper.  Why does this filthmonger get a pass?  Because he's marketed as a conscious rapper?  His song about losing his virginity is supposed to be charming and self-effacing, but it's just vile and pottymouthed.  This guy makes AKINYELE sound like a shrinking violet.  He wants to be NAS, but Nas only rapped about analingus.  J. Cole is the epitome of a "nice guy" who is actually a bag of garbage.

The depth of YOUNG THUG'S lyric about going to prison and fucking your father gives bold definition to the gratuitous pornography of Cole's lyrics.  In less than a bar, Young Thug makes a provocative open-ended statement on the penal system and sexual abuse.  Insulting one's opponent is a key trope in rap, but with a wry acknowledgement of his public image's controversial gender politics, Young Thug uses it as an opportunity to subvert rap's explicit standard of heteronormativity, challenge gender norms, and silence homophobia.  Kudos to Young Thug.  He should rename himself Young Social Justice Warrior.  J. Cole should talk to a priest or a sex therapist idk fuck him.

YOUNG THUG WEEK CONTINUES, AND I GUESS FUTURE RELEASED AN ALBUM TOO?

Finally listened to Dirty Sprite 2.  It's aight, but where did this "Honest sucked" memo come from?  Honest was FUTURE'S Tusk.   Not everything was great, but it was the album where he let those cellulars breathe.

Meanwhile, the appreciation for Barter 6 grows.  One thing I can respect about YOUNG THUG and Future is that neither of 'em has ever made an AOR album for the Rolling Stone ofays.  The very title of Barter 6 pokes fun at the notion of preordained classics, word to WAYNE'S pompous Carter imprimatur.  It's a slapdash mix of great songs, which is what a great pop album should be.  No grandiose statement-making, that shit is for the CHRIS GAINESES of the world, that's word to KEITH URBAN.  And hey, rap nerds hate on Carter 3, but that was the last album you'd hear blastin outta one whip in every six, that's word to Saturn.  People actually listenin to Barter 6, and we some grassroots populist soapboxers over here.  That's word to William Jennings Bryan.

THE EDUCATION OF YAK GOTTI

 Who are you, Yak Gotti?  What are your interests?  Where are you from, where are you heading?  What's your five year plan?

YAK GOTTI is a great rap name because it twists genre convention.  An absurdist answer to the banality of the YOUNG THUG handle, it suggests an erotic fan-fic scenario in which YO GOTTI impregnates YAK BALLZ.  Though out of left field, the yak appellation makes sense in light of his debt to Thugger's yodel.  The Ricola man probably owned yaks for business and pleasure, and he is the greatest yodeler of his generation.

Yak Gotti has one of the better debut verses in recent memory with his turn on Barter 6's "Dream."  Introducing himself to with the unctuousness of a used-car salesman ("How ya doin?  I'm Yak Gotti"), the smirk quickly turns shit-eating: "I got bodies on bodies."  Yak is Joe Pesci in Goodfellas.  Beneath the gladhanding calm is a timebomb who wants to put an icepick through your eye socket.  He raps like he has a dagger grit between his teeth.  The tension between public faces makes it memorably disturbing.

Unfortunately, none of Yak's other material lives up to the high standard established on "Dream."  He shows glimmers of light occasionally, but it seems he was largely a serial trapist before Thugger turned him into the belle of the ball.  On the bright side, post-Thug bleating has officially taken root.  One of Yak's more recent verses is on an overloaded JOSE GUAPO joint, on which Yak yodels to the spirit of Young Thug for dear delivery from a clowncar of B-list bando bit players.  "Alley Oop" has a spark;  "Dripset" is a cavalcade of whatevers.

Is Yak Gotti NAS on "Live At The BBQ" or the next RBX?  More importantly, is he from Miami or Atlanta?  He got a 305 tat on his chest in the "Stick And Move" video, but the false alarm of JAY 305 taught me to tread lightly.

SPANISH GUITAR FILES: IS YOUNG THUG THE NEW DYLAN? IS DAVID BLUE THE OLD YOUNG THUG?

Fuck all those cats, yeah we doggin in here / That Bentley got brown wood like a Spalding in here

YOUNG THUG rockin a Spanish guitar, but it's through the grotesque Thugger lens, so it's one of those weird Picasso guitars where you like, "You can't be serious, Pablo Picasso, no one can play that fuckin thing. That's ridiculous."  It's introspective, but not enough to fall within the Sensitive Thug ouevre.  I appreciate the way he employs the technique of rhetorical momentum via repetition; i.e., rhyming the second to last word of the couplets while repeating the last word.  BIRDMAN, rap's Brian Epstein, nods in approval as he squirts the bounty of a hands-free orgasm all over his breezy sweatpants.

The irony of Young Thug as symbol of everything wrong with hip-hop is that he is one of the last evolving practitioners of rapping for the sake of rapping.  He is rapping about rapping even when he's not explicitly rapping about rapping.  Young Thug songs are very seldom about anything at all except language itself: exploring new possibilities and defining limitations; stretching that shit like some A.C. saltwater taffy; dislocating a word to the point of absurdity, meaninglessness, and/or unexpected meaning.  Many of his songs are based on cliched premises; the mode of expression is the true subject.  Just cause he's playful doesn't mean his work ain't serious.

CALLIN ALL BIRDMEN: RICH HOMIE QUAN AND YOUNG THUG NEED TO KISS AND MAKE UP

Travi$ Scott & Young Thug - "Drunk"

Ya boy about to resort to some Parent Trap situation finessin', and not just because I'm a sap when friendship is concerned.  Check my VHS collection, Goonies worn down like the only Vanessa del Rio joint in an all-boys boarding school.  If the situation continues all acrimonious-like, that means Ima have to keep putting up with Travi$ Scott tagging along like a less entertaining Cousin Oliver.

Something eminently hateable about Mr. Scott Tissue.  He remind me of the kind of dude u meet when ur seeing a rich girl and she and her friends drag u to wack clubz for ppl who go to Ibiza, and they all taking molly and coke, and this one fuckin dude can only talk about Europe, drugs, and festivals cause he a boring prick, and you reassessin if the pussy really that good to be putting up with this shit.  He the rap game version of that guy.  Another analogy: Travis Scott is Michael Holman to Young Thug's Basquiat, an agent of ambition chasing the vapors of genius, desperately hoping he can dickride his way into the history books.  I'm feelin like a concerned mom, cause I think he's a bad influence on Thugger.

Travi$ Scott, if I ever see you Ima hoist u by ur Costume National tighty-whities until they ain't white no more.  Let me clarify: I'm going to give you such an intensive wedgie, the physiological response will stain your undergarments with house-recipe blood and feces.  And that's real talk.  Look me up, I ain't hard to find.  Chuuuuch.

13 THOUGHTZ ON THE BARTER 6

(Ed. note: had to censor the nudity for our yunger readers, so I gave him some cool cargos [or bool bargos lol].  I'll let u decide if they're pants or shorts!)

Listicle time, bitch!  These shitz is the waviest, no Dave Mariner!  For those who ain't know, listicles are a way to present ur thoughtz if you don't really feel like ordering ya shit in poisonous paragraphical structures, ya feel?  That shit went outta style when the Innanet sonned ya boy Gutenberg, that simple ass Bible printin herb.  Fuck Johan Gutenberg, we still got beef.  He knows what he did.  Anyway, ya just write shit out like it's a list even tho u ain't ranking anything, it's just a lazy way of imposing some arbitrary order to ya shitz.  Woop woop, hollaback!  Yo fa real, these listiclez is like the hors d'oeuvres of the bloggin game, so sink ya gold-plated ivory toothpicks into my mental goat cheese crostinis and expozitory jalapeno poppers!

1.  Like Based God's I'm Gay, the Carter 6 title trolling was funny until it went from soundbite to "Oh shit he actually doin this, SMDH."  Retitling it The Barter 6 gets points for stupidity, but not enough to make up for the fact that he titled his album The Barter 6.

2.  If Young Thug sets the standard for an inverse relationship between banality of name and banality of music, Young Dolph is the other extreme  Such a bizarre name, such a boring, boring rapper. 

3.  "Constantly Hating" and "Dream" have the airiness I loved in "Shine," the early noughties Cash Money smash that never was.  Makes me feel like I'm floating on a flyboard in the nude with a fistful of Xanax and a couple sea-nymphs champing at my bits.

4.  Birdman looks and sounds like someone left a loaded Po' Boy in the back of his S-Class, and the oysters just got extra pungent.  Say what you will about the most dubious man in rap, but he's the creepy manager-svengali the game needs.  The star he had tattooed on his head was one of the great Cool Dad midlife crises to play out in the public eye, the Rap Game "getting frosted tips" or "experimenting with bootcut jeans."  From a cell covered in Aaron Carter magazine clippings, Lou Pearlman nods his extraglandular turkey neck in approval.

5.  Some of the beats on Barter and the last Rich Gang tape are so smooth and lush.  I hope London on da Track is ushering in a '70s-style smooooth era of rap.  Think Steely Dan, Frankie Beverley, and the Brothers Doobie and Isley.  This the kinda shit that make you wanna dress in white linens and blow lines on a yacht wit hoes wit da Farrah Fawcett hair.

6.  I fux with albums that are under 14 songs.  Also like that there are no "name" guests besides T.I. and Boosie.

7.  Young Thug could have had a career as a voice actor or whatever it is Michael Winslow does.

8.  It will take a few years longer before Young Thug is widely acknowledged as a great rapper because 64.6% of what he says is indecipherable without conscious effort.  I though this was a stupid criticism until someone whose opinion I respect told me, "I don't like him because I can't understand what he's saying."  A major part of being a Young Thug fan is that his music needs defending.  It's a rough pearl before the dummies who can't hear the brilliance, and within that is an implicit smug superiority.  He is the posterboy of post-lyricism, a school of thought that get off on knowing better than the people who stake their reputation on knowing better.

And that's the rub.   Although the slurred articulation is integral to his delivery and style, I'll bet you there's only a handful of people walkin this planet who can recite a Young Thug song verse for verse.  He increasingly sounds like he just got some heavy oral surgery done.  There's a fine line between acknowledging that lyrics aren't everything and acting like they don't matter at all.   True, Young Thug might be one of the more inventive writers out.  But how much does that matter if most people can't hear it?

9.  1017 Thug is still the best and most varied thing Young Thug has done.  This is p good tho.

10.  Barter 6 is at least as good as To Pimp A Butterfly, if only because there is nothing as bad as "For Free?" or the open-mic-night interview with 2Pac.  "OD" mentions Mike Brown, so Young Thug is officially #conscious, OK?  Rap remains the Buzzfeed of the ghetto!

11.  Someone get this man an echoplex.

12.  My mans makes Migos Flow look like child's play on "Just Might Be."  There's a lot of rappin-ass rappin' on the whole album.

13.  Can Young Thug sustain a career on "weirdness?"  Most talk centers on Young Thug as misunderstood genius or rap Antichrist.  But what happens when his schtick gets stale and familiar, as it inevitably will?   Maybe he'll keep barreling into the unknown.  Maybe he'll stagnate and everyone will move on, as with the Gucci Craze of '09.  The forced zaniness of Wayne ca. 2010 is a chilling potential outcome, altho Thugga hasn't shown a tendency for making egregious aesthetic choices so far.

I ain't said this in a while, so here it goes: CHUUUUUCH!

RICH GANG AND THE RAP CULTURE WAR: IT'S MORE THAN TIGHT PANTS!

Seems 2014 was the year of RICH GANG with all these crit hoez bending over to get spit roasted by RICH HOMIE QUAN and YOUNG THUG, but why exactly did they become such a cause célèbre?  It seemed to go beyond music, a get with it or get left behind ultimatum on the future direction of rap.  Da Yung Turkz drew a line in the sand, tellin old heads to get with the program or fuck off - a flip of the bird to the conservative coalition, with RICH GANG as the extended middle finger.

Other day I was posted on the corner suckin on a chili dog with my lil homie, just bumping some OG MELLENCAMP and passin a Kool back and forth.  Exhaling the mentholated essence, my patna tells me QUAN is a hipster rapper, totally changing my perspective of his standing in the rap universe.  I felt like 18th century headz pobably did when Galileo dropped his Origin of the Species mixtape talkin bout we evolved from Magilla Gorilla.  It's true, but not in the sense SHABAZZ PALACES or YUNG LEAN are - hipsters like em, but they ain't the sole or primary audience.

Full disclosure: me and the lil homie dipped the Kool in the wet up, so by now I was seein diagrams of the stars like my man Saint Francis Drake when he discovered that Pluto was actually just a cartoon dog.  I thought back to the Culture Wars of '04, when Kelefa Sanneh hit em up with that rockist dis track and Pitchfork realized rap was about more than white dreadlocks and dudes in Che shirts.

Surprising many, hipsters rallied around DIPSET.  CAM's Purple Haze was especially galvanizing.  The choice was understandable if unexpected: THE DIPS pillaged '80s cheese in an ironic way, but they kicked a kind of diddy-boppin Harlem flyness that was new without being drastically removed from East Coast classicism.  They were charismatic, absurd, and visually outlandish, comin off like a hood take on the garish-fabulous David La Chapelle schtick.   It was a radical departure from the rappers presented themselves, and their contribution to rap aesthetics still hasn't been appreciated properly.

These days RICH GANG occupies the same role.  YOUNG THUG and RHQ kick two styles of raps that are equally controversial and relevant.  QUAN is one of the more visible practitioners of the ATL strain of melodic rapping, a particularly troubling development for OGs who see it as the end of straight rappity-rappin.  Everyone knows THUGGA is a weirdo and that's nothin new in hip-hop, but the way he's acting out that eccentricity is.   We had cats like DEL and SHOCK G who made some noise in the mainstream, but at the end of the day they were cult figures standing on the sidelines of the mainstream ball.  On the other hand, LIL B is too much of a self-contained concern, and the underground freaks don't count for quinoa.  WAYNE and ANDRE are the closest antecedents to YOUNG THUG, but WAYNE's weirdness declined once he became a pop star and got off the drugs.  ANDRE is more about kickin knowledge, with a style that owes more to SOULS OF MISCHIEF than KILO ALI.

Where ANDRE was workin in the mainstream and critiquing it at the same time, YOUNG THUG accepts convention only to bend it out of shape.  If he's critiquing anything, it's only implicit.  This could just be a byproduct of the times they came up - 'KAST laid the groundwork for Atlanta rap on an international scale, so there wasn't yet an established idea of what it was "supposed to be" - but ANDRE is an outlier within hip-hop and in pop culture at large.  His subversion is undisguised; THUG is doing something subtler.

On top of that THUG occasionally puts on a skirt, so of course hipsters gonna rally around this shit!  Ol' hatin ass LORD JAMAR would call them beta males (or worse), and what are hipsters if not beta males (or worse)?  It's cool, good music is good music, but let's hope they don't start pandering to the new audience or gettin high on themselves cause that's how you end up with an Idlewild.  I'll accept some Speakerboxxx/The Love Below self-indulgence, but first they gotta drop their ATLiens.

DEFLATING THE GUCCI MANE MARKET

I get that GUCCI is tryin to remind the fickle rap public of his existence as he sits in the clink catching up on Nora Roberts novels, but there's something to be said for leaving the public wanting more.  Whether it was intentional or not, BOOSIE's silence behind bars created huge anticipation for Life After Deathrow.  Fans missed him.

Even his biggest fans won't say that about GUCCI.  By now his prolific output behind bars is an in-joke along the lines of 2PAC's bewildering beyond-the-grave activity.  It seems he's got that Richard Nixon gene where he's so obsessed with leaving a legacy he documents his every ad-lib.  That backfired on Prezzy Big Dick, and it seems to be having a similar effect on GUWOP.  The brevity of Views From Zone 6 is a relief from the bloated heft of some recent mixtapes, but its slapped-together feel betrays its origins.  For an eight song EP, there are a staggering number of features: QUAVO, LIL REESE, 2 CHAINZ, PEEWEE LONGWAY, LIL B, etc.  Also present are CHIEF KEEF and ANDY MILONAKIS, the worst rap combo since KANYE and JOHN MAYER.

Clearly the features were a product of necessity, but the collaborations lack chemistry in consequence.  GUCCI should tell his people to cool it with the vault clearing and focus on himself, maybe take up meditation or explore the possibilities of stick 'n' poke.  The only real highlight here is the mesmerizing "Bitter," featuring YOUNG THUG and YUNG GLEESH, a welcome entry in his ongoing Word Series.